Gallery: Laurie Masters's Oil Paintings of Rock 'n' Roll Stars

By Tom Hawking

June 29, 2011

We recently stumbled across an impressive trove of rock ‘n’ roll portraits by Ontario artist Laurie Masters over at Behance Network. Masters is apparently entirely self-taught and creates her portraits of celebrities from photographs – she was originally a musician, and as such it’s perhaps no surprise that her work focuses largely on musicians (PJ Harvey, M.I.A., the Arcade Fire), although her subject matter also encompasses a variety of other artists and actors. Endearingly, she also creates dolls of her subjects, some of which can be seen at her website (apparently Flight of the Conchords were particularly impressed by their stuffed likenesses). We’re not necessarily always fans of the whole painting-directly-from-photos idea, but Masters’ rock ‘n’ roll portraits are an interesting and ongoing project. We’ve collected some of our favorites after the jump.